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Re: Nature of Science (NOS)



At 12:56 -0400 9/2/02, John S. Denker wrote:

Regarding the role of science fairs in spreading misconceptions
about the nature of science:

1) There is no doubt that bad things are going on.

Google turns up a lot of seemingly-authoritative
science-fair sites that say truly appalling things
about "the" scientific method.

2) On the other hand, we should be careful not to
tar all science fairs with the same brush.

I've also seen both types, so it is clear that the crazy definitions
of scientific method don't hold sway everywhere, but as long as we're
talking about science fairs, I would argue that the main problem with
science fairs is not their weird idea of what the scientific method
is, it is the two-tiered nature of the entries--one group of entries
tends to be not too imaginative, or if imaginative, crudely executed,
while the other group has a slickly professional appearance. It is
clear that the latter group is almost exclusively done by parents
(not all of them, certainly, but the vast majority). This can easily
be verified by asking some probing questions of the presenter. Often
they will be totally unable to answer the simplest question about
their project--one that they would have easily answered if they had
actually done it. Those in the latter group are almost all children
of professional parents, usually engineers or scientists, while the
former are usually children of non-professional, or at least
non-science-trained parents.

The lesson here is not lost on the children--the best way to get
ahead in the world is to choose your parents carefully, especially,
choose parents who are willing to cheat to further your academic
career. And if you don't have parents who can cheat for you, you will
just have to cheat by yourself.

Of course the recent scandals of the CEOs has done nothing to dispel this idea.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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